History of Tokyo 1867-1989: From EDO to SHOWA: The Emergence of the World's Greatest City

INTRODUCTION

There can be few cities in the world that live, pulsate, and breathe through their geography as Tokyo does, few cities with a history that shifts through the creases of space as does that of Tokyo. This is particularly ironic in a city whose neighborhoods today hold few distinctive features and whose gentle topography has been all but obscured by batteries of buildings. But it was not always so, and what better way is there of writing Tokyo’s history than by reflecting this shifting geography as neighborhoods prospered and declined while others, more aspirational, climbed up the socio-spatial ladder? This is precisely what Edward Seidensticker does in the pages of these two books, brought here together for the first time under one cover thanks to the efforts of a number of people, including Donald Richie, and the publisher.

Few books in whatever language are so suffused with the spirit of a city as Seidensticker’s classic accounts, suffused with the spirit of the city, but also imbued with the wit of their author. These are not conventional histories. While they are written with a strong sense of history’s ebb and flow, they are held together by their representation of the decline and mar ginalization of a way of life that was at the same time a part of town. Throughout these books, there is a sense of foreboding and of a fatal destiny being played out. But at the same time, there is a lightness of touch and an appropriateness of the chosen detail that provokes a smile, a chuckle, and a raised eyebrow on each reading.

This is definitely not anyone’s Tokyo. It is Seidensticker’s Tokyo. And Seidensticker’s Tokyo starts in the Low City and moves out with it to embrace Asakusa. Much of these two volumes is dominated by the demise of the Low City and all that it stood for, until, that is, more recent years, when the deed is all but done and Asakusa consigned to the role of outpost for tourists. Many of Tokyo’s districts have a part to play in these pages, indeed they are the principal characters, invested with a personality that can change with time but that is rooted in a sense of the almost atavistic attraction of the Low City and the parvenu presumption exhibited by the districts of the High City. So it is that we see the emergence of Ginza from obscurity in the shogun’s city of Edo to shop window for all that was stylish and new. Nihonbashi, the old center of the merchants’ city, was much more sedate, losing out slowly to the nearby district of Marunouchi. Roppongi gets short shrift as an upstart pleasure district that grew up as a result of US military facilities in the post-war period. Shinjuku and Shibuya are the back of beyond, to put it politely.

Alongside the districts, there are a number of buildings whose presence animates these books: the Twelve-Storys tower in Asakusa, destroyed in the great earthquake of 1923; Tokyo Central Station, inconveniently located in the center of the city; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, which famously withstood the tremors; the city’s main theatres, prominent among them the Kabukiza and the Shibuya Embujō. And people, too, whose lives have helped to shape the city and define its culture—people like Hattori Kintarō, the founder of Seikō, the watch-making company; or Josiah Conder, the British architect whose influence was seminal in the teaching of architecture in Japan; or Enoken, the most famous and best-loved of Asakusa’s comedians; or the man called Suzuki who built a block in Shinjuku which he optimistically called Kabukichō. But the individuals whose presence most influences the tenor of these books are the many writers who have built at least part of their opus on Tokyo’s ground, not only the likes of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Kawabata Yasunari, with whom many of us will already be familiar, but lesser-known authors such as Osanai Kaoru and Takami Jun.

This is a cultural and social history which for all its quirkiness is peppered with enlightening vignettes that create a wider context for Tokyo’s history. It is built around a number of leitmotifs: corruption in high places; new cultures and technologies such as the department store; festivals, performances, theater; the geisha and the licensed quarters. But these two books are far from being orthodox history. They really belong to a genre of their own. It is hard not to reflect on the freedom Seidensticker must have felt writing about Tokyo. On the one hand, he was not translating, with its bondage to the original text. On the other, he was not writing as a historian, and so had no need to adopt the tools of the historian’s trade. Nevertheless, he managed to capture in uncanny ways the telling details of historical change—the transition from feet to wheels in Meiji Tokyo or the change in eating habits after the great earthquake when women started eating out in numbers. This is very much history as it was lived at the time, which is a history reflected in newspaper articles, on stage, in cafés. It is in fact an approach that has more in common with certain traditions of Japanese representations of places and of the past, a cross between topographical writing and satirical social and cultural history. But above all in reading these pages one feels subliminally the presence of Nagai Kafū, the writer whose wistful stories were translated by Seidensticker and whose cultural prejudices are, one senses, shared.

Paul Waley

PREFACE

Now that my friend of some fifty years is no more, I often think of him as I walk along the shores of the Shinobazu no Ike, near where we both lived, he up the hill in Yushima, me in Ueno by the pond. Shinobazu made a good meeting place because it was familiar to both of us and because the whole area had associations we liked.

These associations were mostly literary. Natsume Soseki had lived in the neighborhood when he wrote I Am a Cat, and Mori Ogai’s house was still there (though now turned into a hotel) while Ed himself lived at the top of the steep street which Otama in Ogai’s Wild Geese daily climbed.

Ed found the neighborhood still somehow literary and thought of himself as one of the last local bunjin. Not only did he concern himself with past literature, as in his translation of the Genji Monogatari, but also he loved the past for its own sake, as he demonstrated in his splendid, two-volume history of Tokyo. Yet he entertained a certain ambivalence toward the past, one he shared with us in the finest of all of his works, Kafū the Scribbler.

Just as Kafū disliked Meiji Japan until Taisho Japan turned out even worse, giving him then something to like about vanished Meiji, so Seidensticker disliked much of modern Japan until newer manifestations indicated something worse was on its way, at which point he would become nostalgic about what he had formerly disliked.

He collected these opinions in his feisty columns for the Yomiuri Shimbun, published in English as This Country, Japan, a title with a double meaning. It could be read simply as this country (kono kuni), or as this country! indicating an extreme degree of exasperation with Japan. His opinions and his way of arriving at them were so close to those of Kafū that is not surprising that Kafū the Scribbler is both an extraordinarily perceptive literary history and also a completely personal identification.

As I walk along the shores of Shinobazu no Ike I now think of the many times I met Seidensticker there, as he slowly wandered about, looking (though fatter) much like a latter-day Kafū himself. And when we talked about literature we always talked about Kafū. One of his regrets, he said, was that he had never met the great author. He knew Kawabata and Tanizaki, Mishima and others, but he had never met Kafū, the author he most admired.

Since Kafū was also my own favorite Japanese author, he became one of the things that Ed and I had in common. We also both favored a certain kind of English author who, like Kafū, had an immaculate style and an anomalous taste for the past: authors such as Thomas Love Peacock, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Ronald Firbank.

And Jane Austen. We were both besotted with her six novels, read them all the time, even formed an unauthorized Jane Austen Society of Japan (along with Shulamith Rubinfein and Sheelagh Cluny), just for ourselves. Such tastes might be thought narrow but they had admirable results. Whenever I reread Seidensticker’s Genji, I see that the tone, the mood, the feeling of this translation—its lightness, its rightness—owe much to his admiration for Jane Austen. She is standing there, just behind Murasaki Shikibu.

Sometimes in my evening walks around Shinobazu I would discover Ed on one of the benches, sitting there, regarding the pond. Sometimes he had been drinking (he liked shochu), sometimes not. Whichever, we always talked about the same things. I remember one such conversation. I am delighted to see you, he said. "For I have something to tell you. My afternoon was spent with Abe Kobo and we spoke of his style, and he said that critics always said that the influence was Franz Kafka, but they were absolutely wrong. The real influence was Alice in Wonderland. Isn’t that nice? Lewis Carroll!"

But then Seidensticker’s physical problems began. He conquered his liking for shochu, but he had two hip replacements and could never properly walk after that. I would sometimes see him hobbling about Shinobazu of an evening, but gradually he stopped coming—he fell down too often. Instead we would meet, once a week or so, at an Ueno Indian restaurant we both liked and which he could reach by taxi.

Having much criticized Showa Japan while we were still in it, he was now praising the immediate postwar years because he found so much wrong with Heisei Japan. During our later meetings it was the contemporary young that irritated him the most with their laziness, their rudeness, their narcissistic ways. He remembered how much nicer the young people of Showa Japan had seemed, those he had formerly criticized just as bitterly. And we often (like Kafu, like all old people) remembered a kind of beauty which, whether or not it had actually existed, lived on in us.

Seidensticker was not only a bunjin and a splendid translator, he was also a man who (like Kafū) had the highest standards and was honest enough to criticize what he loved. He cared deeply for Japan, more so than many another foreigner, more so than many Japanese. Perhaps that was why he was on the shores of Shinobazu Pond on the day of the accident, April 26, 2007. It had been an unusually warm spring day with sun and the promise of summer. Now, as evening approached and the long shadows spread across the waters, it was perhaps because of a wish to enjoy this that he left the taxi and walked as best he could through the park on his way to the Indian restaurant and dinner with me and our friend Patrick Lovell.

Now when I take my stroll around the pond I always pass the small staircase down which he fell that day and fractured his skull. It is very short, just five steps, but falling from the top one was enough to put him into the coma that lasted four months to the day, ending with his death on August 26.

And then as I continue around the pond I see in the distance that some one is sitting on the bench where we used to sit. It has grown dark now—it is twilight, a star or two has appeared. I walk nearer to the seated person. I know that it is not my friend, Edward Seidensticker, but I wish it were.

Donald Richie

Used with permission of International House of Japan. This material originally appeared in the IHJ Bulletin and is an expanded version of an obituary which appeared in Japanese in the magazine Ueno, a publication for which Seidensticker regularly wrote.

BOOK ONE

LOW CITY, HIGH CITY

Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake: How the Shogun’s Ancient Capital Became a Great Modern City, 1867–1923

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

When young, I did not dedicate books. Dedications seemed over-blown and showy. It is too late to begin; but if this book carried a dedication, it would be to the memory of Nagai Kafū.

Though he was not such a good novelist, he has come to seem better and better at what he was good at. He was his best in brief lyrical passages and not in sustained narrative and dramatic ones. He is the novelist whose views of the world’s most consistently interesting city accord most closely with my own. He has been my guide and companion as I have explored and dreamed and meditated upon the city.

I do not share his yearning for Edo, the city when it was still the seat of the Tokugawa shoguns and before it became the Eastern Capital. The Tokugawa Period is somehow dark and menacing. Too many gifted people were squelched, and, whether gifted or not, I always have the feeling about Edo that, had I been there, I would have been among the squelched ones.

I share Kafū’s affection for the part of the city which had its best day then. The twilight of that day lasted through the succeeding Meiji reign and down to the great earthquake. It is the Shitamachi, the plebeian flatlands, which I here call the Low City. Meiji was when the changes that made Japan modern and economically miraculous were beginning. Yet the Low City had not lost its claim to the cultural hegemony which it had clearly possessed under the Tokugawa.

Many exciting things have occurred in the six decades since the earthquake, which is slightly farther from the present than from the beginning of Meiji. Another book asks to be written, about those decades and especially the ones since the surrender. Perhaps it will be written, but it would have to be mostly about the other half (these days considerably more than half), the hilly High City, the Yamanote. That is where the artist and the intellectual, and to an increasing extent the manager and the magnate, have been. If there is less in this book about the High City than the Low City, it is because one is not drawn equally to everything in a huge and complex city, and a book whose beginnings lie in personal experience does have a way of turning to what interests and pleases.

Kafū was an elegist, mourning the death of Edo and lamenting the emergence of modern Tokyo. With such a guide and companion, an elegiac tone is bound to emerge from time to time. The departure of the old and the emergence of the new are inextricably entwined, of course. Yet, because the story of what happened to Edo is so much the story of the Low City, matters in which it was not interested do not figure much. It was not an intellectual sort of place, nor was it strongly politi cal. Another consideration has urged the elimination of political and intellectual matters: the fact that Tokyo became the capital of Japan in 1868. A distinction may be made between what occurred in the city because it was the capital, and what occurred because it was a city.

So this book contains little political and intellectual history, and not much more literary and economic history. The major exception in literary matters is the drama, the great love of the Edo townsman. The story of what happened to Kabuki is central to the story of the city, and not that of the capital. The endeavor to describe a changing city as if it were an organism is perhaps not realistic, since cities change in all ways and directions, as organisms and specific institutions do not. The subject here is the changing city all the same, the legacy of Edo and what happened to it. To a much smaller degree is it the story of currents that have flowed in upon the city because it was the capital.

Japanese practice has been followed in the rendition of personal names. The family name comes before the given name. When a single element is used, it is the family name if there is no elegant pen-name (distinguished in principle from a prosy one like Mishima Yukio), and the pen-name when there is one. Hence Kafū and Shigure, both of them pen-names; but Tanizaki, Kubota, and Shibusawa, all of them family names.

The staff of the Tokyo Metropolitan Archives was very kind in helping assemble illustrations. The prints, woodcut and lithograph, are from Professor Donald Keene’s collection and my own, except as noted in the captions. I am also in debt to the Tokyo Central Library and the Toyo Keizai Shimpō. Mr. Fukuda Hiroshi was very helpful in photographing photographs that could not be taken across the Pacific for reproduction.

The notes are minimal, limited for the most part to the sources of direct quotations. A very important source, acknowledged only once in the notes, is the huge work called A History of the Tokyo Century (although it begins with the beginnings of Edo), published by the municipal government in the early 1970s, with a supplemental chronology published in 1980. Huge it certainly is, six volumes (without the chronology), each of them some fifteen hundred pages long. Uneven it is as well, and indispensable.

Guidebooks, four of them acknowledged in the notes, were very useful, the two-volume guide published by the city in 1907 especially so. Then there were ward histories, none of them acknowledged, because I have made no direct quotation from them. The Japanese are energetic and accomplished local historians, as much so as the British. Their volumes pour forth in bewildering numbers, those Japanese equivalents of the admirable history of southeast Berks one is always seeing reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. Every ward has at least one history. Some are better than others, not because some are especially unreliable, but because some are better organized and less given to axegrinding.

I do not pretend to have been through them all, but none that I have looked at has been valueless.

The most important source is Nagai Kafū. To him belongs the final acknowledgment, as would belong the dedication if there were one.

E.S.

April, 1982

Chapter1

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

There was foreboding in Japan on September 1, 1923. September 2 would be the Two-Hundred-Tenth Day, counting from the day in early February when spring is held to begin. Awaited each year with apprehension, it comes during the typhoon season and the harvest. The conjunction of the two, harvest and typhoon, can mean disaster. The disaster of that year came instead on September 1.

The morning was warm, heavy, as most days of late summer are, with the shrilling of locusts. The mugginess was somewhat relieved by brisk winds, which shifted from east to south at about nine. A low-pressure zone covered the southern part of the Kantō Plain, on the fringes of which the city lies. The winds became stronger as the morning drew on. Rain fell, stopping at eleven. The skies cleared.

The city was awaiting the don, the bang of the cannon which since 1871 had been fired at noon every day in the palace plaza.

At one minute and fifteen and four-tenths seconds before noon, the great earthquake struck. The initial shocks were so violent that the seismographs at the Central Weather Bureau went out of commission. The surviving seismograph at Tokyo Imperial University made the only detailed record of the long series of quakes, more than seventeen hundred over the next three days. The epicenter was in Sagami Bay, southeast of the city. There was sinkage along a deep trough and a rising along the sides. The eastern limits of the modern city follow one earthquake zone, which runs along the Edo River and out into Tokyo Bay, and lie very near another, which crosses the wide mouth of Sagami Bay from the tip of the Chiba Peninsula to the tip of the Izu Peninsula. There had been a disastrous quake in 1855, centered on the Edo River zone, and a major though less disastrous one in the summer of 1894, also centered on the nearer of the two zones. It was assumed at that time that there would presently be another, and it is so assumed today, in 1982. Talk in 1923 of moving the capital to safer regions had been quieted by a proclamation from the emperor himself.

Between noon of September 1 and the evening of September 2, most of the Tokyo flatlands—the eastern sections of the city, the Shitamachi or Low City—went up in flames. The Low City produced most of what was original in the culture of Edo (as Tokyo had been known until the Meiji emperor moved there from Kyoto in 1867). Much of the Low City survived on the morning of September 1, and then, in forty hours or so, most of it disappeared.

Though we do not know how many died in the earthquake and the fires that followed, initial reports in the Western press almost certainly exaggerated. The Los Angeles Times informed a large and alarmed Japanese readership that half a million had died. The highest estimates today put the figure for Tokyo at something over a hundred thousand. Far more were killed in the fires than in the earthquake itself, and there seem to have been more deaths from drowning than from collapsed buildings.

Almost half the deaths, or perhaps more than half, if lower estimates are accepted for the total, occurred in an instant at a single place in the Low City, a park, formerly an army clothing depot, near the east or left bank of the Sumida River. Fires had started in several parts of the city soon after the initial shocks. There were whirlwinds of fire up and down the Sumida from midafternoon; the largest of them, according to witnesses, covered about the area of the Sumō wrestling gymnasium, the largest building east of the river, and was several hundred feet high. A flaming whirlwind came down upon the park at about four in the afternoon, and incinerated upwards of thirty thousand people who had fled there from the fires sweeping the Low City.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, the great writer of short stories and a man of strong suicidal impulses, liked to tell people that had he then been in his native Honjo, east of the river, he would probably have taken refuge where everyone else did, and been spared the trouble of suicide.

In a family of nine, relatives of my wife, only a son, about twenty, survived. He was standing with a shutter over his head to ward off sparks when he was picked up by a whirlwind and deposited in the Yasuda garden. There he regained consciousness.

The traditional wooden house has great powers of resistance to wind, flood, and earthquake. It resisted well this time too, and then came the fires, leaving only scattered pockets of buildings across the Low City. The damage would have been heavy if the quakes alone had caused it, but most of the old city would have survived. Even then, seventy years after the arrival of Commodore Perry and fifty-five years after the resignation of the last Edo shogun, it was built mostly of wood. Buildings of more substantial materials came through the quakes well, though many were gutted by the fires. There has been much praise for the aplomb with which Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel came through, built as it was of volcanic stone on an earthquake-proof foundation. It did survive, and deserves the praise; yet so did a great many other modern buildings (though not all). The Mitsukoshi Department Store suffered only broken windows from the quake, but burned as brightly as the sun, people who saw it said, when the fires took over. That the Imperial Hotel did not burn brightly was due entirely to chance.

It is difficult to judge earthquake damage when fires sweep a city shortly afterwards. Memories shaken and distorted by the horror of it all must be counted on to establish what was there in the brief interval between quake and fire. The best information suggests that after it was over almost three-quarters of the buildings in the city had been destroyed or seriously damaged, and almost two-thirds of them were destroyed or gutted by fire. The earthquake itself can be held clearly responsible only for the difference between the two figures.

Fifteen wards made up the city; a single one remained untouched by fire. It lay in the High City, the hilly regions to the west. In five wards the loss was above 90 percent and in a sixth only slightly less. The five all lay in the Low City, along the Sumida and the bay. The sixth lay mostly in the Low City, but extended also into the hills. In Shitaya Ward, half Low City and half High City, the flat portions were almost completely destroyed, with the line of the fires stopping cleanly at the hills. Had Ueno Park in Shitaya been hit as the erstwhile clothing depot was, the casualty lists might well have doubled.

Determining the number and cause of the fires has been as difficult as distinguishing between earthquake damage and fire damage. The best estimate puts the total number at upwards of a hundred-thirty, of which well over half could not be controlled. Most of the damage occurred during the first afternoon and night. It was early on the morning of September 2 that the Mitsukoshi was seen burning so brightly. Nineteen fires, the largest number for any of the fifteen wards, began in Asakusa, east of Shitaya. By the morning of September 3 the last of them had burned themselves out or been extinguished.

Ruins in Asakusa, including the Twelve Storys, after the earthquake.

It is commonly said that the chief reason for the inferno was the hour at which the first shocks came. Lunch was being prepared all over the city, upon gas burners and charcoal braziers. From these open flames and embers, common wisdom has it, the fires began.

But in fact many fires seem to have had other origins. Chemicals have been identified as the largest single cause, followed by electric wires and burners. This suggests that the same disaster might very well have occurred at any hour of the day. The earthquake of 1855 occurred in the middle of the night. Much of the Low City was destroyed then too. Most of the damage was caused by fire—yet in the mid-nineteenth century there were no electric lines and probably few chemicals to help the fire on. Fires will start, it seems, whenever buildings collapse in large numbers. No fire department can cope with them when they start simultaneously at many points on a windy day. Tokyo is now a sea of chemicals and a tangle of utility wires. It is not as emphatically wooden as it once was, to be sure, but the Low City, much of it a jumble of small buildings on filled land, will doubtless be the worst hit when the next great earthquake comes.

Among the rumors that went flying about the city was the imaginative one that an unnamed country of the West had developed an earthquake machine and was experimenting upon Japan. There were, nevertheless, no outbreaks of violence against foreigners, which in Japan usually means Westerners. Instead, the xenophobia of the island nation turned on Koreans.

The government urged restraint, not to make things easier for Koreans, but because the Western world might disapprove: it would not do for such things to be reported in the Western press. Rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells. The police were later accused of encouraging hostility by urging particular attention to wells, but probably not much encouragement was needed. A willingness, and indeed a wish, to believe the worst about Koreans has been a consistent theme in modern Japanese culture. The slaughter was considerable, in any event. Reluctant official announcements put casualties in the relatively low three figures. The researches of the liberal scholar Yoshino Sakuzō were later to multiply them by ten, bringing the total to upwards of two thousand.

Not all the things of Edo were destroyed. The most popular temple in the city, the great Asakusa Kannon, survived. An explanation for its close escape was that a statue of the Meiji Kabuki actor Danjūrō, costumed as the hero of Shibaraku (meaning One Moment, Please), held back flames advancing from the north. But fire did destroy the Yoshiwara, most venerable of the licensed quarters that had been centers of Edo culture.

Several fine symbols of Meiji Tokyo were also destroyed. The old Shimbashi Station, northern terminus of the earliest railroad in the land, was among the modern buildings that did not survive. The Ryōunkaku (literally Cloud Scraper), a twelve-story brick tower in Asakusa, had survived the earthquake of 1894, when many a brick chimney collapsed and brick architecture in general was brought into disrepute. It had been thought earthquake-proof, but in 1923 it broke off at the eighth story. The top storys fell into a lake nearby, and the rest were destroyed the following year by army engineers.

The great loss was the Low City, home of the merchant and the artisan, heart of Edo culture. From the beginnings of its existence as the shogun’s capital, Edo was divided into two broad regions, the hilly Yamanote or High City, describing a semicircle generally to the west of the shogun’s castle, now the emperor’s palace, and the flat Low City, the Shitamachi, completing the circle on the east. Plebeian enclaves could be found in the High City, but mostly it was a place of temples and shrines and aristocratic dwellings. The Low City had its aristocratic dwellings, and there were a great many temples, but it was very much the plebeian half of the city. And though the aristocracy was very cultivated indeed, its tastes—or the tastes thought proper to the establishment—were antiquarian and academic. The vigor of Edo was in its Low City.

The Low City has always been a vaguely defined region, its precise boundaries difficult to draw. It sometimes seems as much an idea as a geographic entity. When in the seventeenth century the Tokugawa regime set about building a seat for itself, it granted most of the solid hilly regions to the military aristocracy, and filled in the marshy mouths of the Sumida and Tone rivers, to the east of the castle. The flatlands that resulted became the abode of the merchants and craftsmen who purveyed to the voracious aristocracy and provided its labor.

These lands, between the castle on the west and the Sumida and the bay on the east, were the original Low City. Of the fifteen Meiji wards, it covered only Nihombashi and Kyōbashi and the flatlands of Kanda and Shiba. Asakusa, most boisterous of the Meiji pleasure centers, was scarcely a part of the old city at all. It lay beyond one of the points guarding approaches to the city proper, and was built initially to serve pilgrims to its own great Kannon temple. Later it was linked to the theater district, and was a part of the complex that catered to the Yoshiwara licensed quarter, yet farther to the north.

Today everything east of the Sumida is regarded as part of the Low City, but until Meiji only a thin strip along the east bank of the Sumida was so considered, and not even that by everyone.

The heart of the Low City was Nihombashi, broadest of the lands first reclaimed by the shogunate. Nihombashi set the tone and made the definitions. Nihombashi proper, the Japan Bridge from which the district took its name, was the spot where all roads began. Distances from the city were measured from Nihombashi. A proper resident of Nihombashi did not have to go far east, perhaps only as far as the Sumida, perhaps a few paces beyond, to feel that he had entered the land of the bumpkin. The Low City was small, tight, and cozy.

It changed a great deal between the resignation of the last shogun and the earthquake. As time runs on, new dates for the demise of Edo are always being assigned by connoisseurs of the subject. In 1895, we are told, or in 1912, Edo finally departed, and only Tokyo remained. Yet even today the Low City is different from the High City, and so it may be said that even today something of Edo survives. The earthquake was all the same a disaster from which the heart of the Low City did not recover. Already before 1923 the wealthy were moving away from Nihombashi, and vitality was departing as well. The earthquake accelerated the movement to the south and west, first apparent in the rise of Ginza. Today the most prosperous centers for drinking and shopping lie beyond the western limits of the Meiji city.

Tokiwa Bridge, Nihombashi, in early Meiji. Later site of the Bank of Japan

Nihombashi and the Low City in general were conservative. There was, of course, resentment at the rigid Tokugawa class structure, which put the merchant below everyone else. By way of fighting back, a satirical vein in the literature and drama of the Low City poked fun at the High City aristocrat, but never strongly enough to make the urban masses a threat to the old order. The Edokko, the child of Edo, as the native of the Low City called himself, was pleased to be there at the knee of Lord Tokugawa, and the shogunate was wise enough to take condescending notice of the populace on certain festival days. When the threat to the regime eventually came, it was from the far provinces, and the Edokko was more resentful of the provincial soldiers who became the new establishment than he had ever been of the old.

He may be taxed with complacency. The professional child of Edo has descendants today, and they are proud of themselves to the point of incivility. They tend to divide the world between the Low City and other places, to the great disadvantage of the latter. The novelist Tanizaki Junichirō, a genuine Edokko, born in 1886 of a Nihombashi merchant family, did not like his fellow Edokko, whom he described as weak, complaining, and generally ineffectual. Yet the Low City of Edo had high standards and highly refined tastes, and if exclusiveness was necessary to maintain them, as the years since have suggested, that seems a small price to pay.

Kyōbashi, to the south of Nihombashi, included Ginza, which came aggressively forward to greet the new day. An artisan quarter under the old regime, Ginza stood at the terminus of the new railway and eagerly brought new things in from Yokohama and beyond. Tanizaki and others have described the diaspora of the Edokko, with Nihombashi its chief victim, as the new people came in. It can be exaggerated, and one suspects that Tanizaki exaggerated for literary effect. He made much also of the helplessness of the Edokko before the entrepreneur from the West Country. Yet many an Edo family did very well. Among those who did best were the Mitsui, established in Nihombashi since the seventeenth century. Not many children of Edo had been there longer. The demographic and cultural movement to the south and west was inexorable all the same, and more rapid after the earthquake.

The High City was much less severely damaged than the Low City. The growing suburbs, many of them later incorporated within the city limits, were hurt even less. Through the years before and after the earthquake, industrial production remained fairly steady for Tokyo Prefecture, which included large suburbs as well as the city proper. Within the fifteen wards of the city, it fell sharply in the same period. The suburban share was growing.

With the Low City pleasure quarters lost in the fires, those of the High City throve. They did not have the same sort of tradition, and the change meant the end of something important in the life of the city. The novelist Nagai Kafū—not, like Tanizaki, a real son of Edo, both because he was not from the merchant class and because his family had not been in the city the three generations held necessary to produce one—was even so an earnest student of Edo and Tokyo. All through his career (he was born in 1879 and died in 1959) he went on lamenting the fact that the latter had killed the former; and all through his career, with lovable inconsistency, he went on remembering how Edo yet survived at this and that date later than ones already assigned to the slaying. Though he is commonly considered an amorous and erotic novelist, his writings are essentially nostalgic and elegiac. The pleasure quarters were central to Edo culture, and it was in those conservative regions if anywhere that something of Edo survived. So it was natural that they should be his favorite subject. He had many harsh things to say about the emergent pleasure centers of the High City, and their failure to keep sex in its place—pleasurable, no doubt, but not the only thing at which the great ladies of the older quarters thought it necessary to excel. The old quarters were genuine centers of the higher arts. The seventy-seventh of the Chinese sexagenary cycles came to a close in 1923. When Cycle Seventy-seven began, in 1864, the Tokugawa shogunate was in its final convulsions. The short administration of the last shogun was soon over, and the Restoration, as it is called in English, occurred. Edo became Tokyo, with the Meiji emperor in residence. Restoration is actually a bad translation of the Japanese ishin, which means something more like renovation or revitalization.

Edo could not have known, at the beginning of the Cycle Seventy-seven, that Lord Tokugawa would so soon be in exile. Yet there were ample causes for apprehension, not the least of which was the presence of the foreigner. He obviously did not mean to go away. At first, upon the opening of the ports, foreigners seem to have been greeted with friendliness and eager curiosity. Presently this changed. A Dutch observer dated the change as 1862, subsequent to which there were many instances of violence, including the stoning of an American consul. The Dutchman put the blame upon the foreigners themselves, an unruly lot whom the port cities attracted. The Edo townsman seems to have had little to do with the violence; his feelings were not that strong. Yet he seems to have agreed with the rustic soldiers responsible for most of the violence that the barbarian should be put back in his place, on the other side of the water.

Early in 1863, the new British legation was destroyed by arsonists of the military class—among them Itō Hirobumi, later to become the most prominent of Meiji statesmen. The legation had been built in the part of the city closest to the relative security of Yokohama. It was not yet occupied, and nothing came of plans for other legations on the same site. The Edo townsman seems to have received news of the fire with satisfaction.

Edo was not, like the great capitals of Europe, a commercial center in its own right, with interests independent of and sometimes in conflict with those of the sovereign. More like Washington than London or Paris, it was an early instance, earlier than Washington, of a fabricated capital. Technically it was not the capital at all, since the emperor remained in Kyoto through the Tokugawa centuries. It was, however, the seat of power. The first shogun established himself there for military reasons, and the commercial and artisan classes gathered, as in Washington, to be of service to the bureaucracy. It was an enormous bureaucracy, because the Tokugawa system required that provincial potentates maintain establishments in the city. The Edo townsman was happy, on the whole, to serve and to make money. He saw enough of the bureaucracy to know that its lesser members, at least, looked upon his own life with some envy.

Land-use maps, though they disagree in matters of detail, are consistent in showing a very large part of the city given over to the aristocracy and to temples and shrines, and a very small part to the plebeian classes, mercantile and artisan. If the expression aristocracy is defined broadly to include everyone attached in some fashion to the central bureaucracy and the establishments of the provincial lords, then the Edo townsman occupied perhaps as little as a fifth of the city. Not even the flatlands commonly held to be his abode belonged entirely to him. The banks of the Sumida were largely aristocratic all the way to Asakusa. The aristocracy possessed most of the land east of the river, and very large expanses as well in eastern Nihombashi and to the east of Ginza. There were extensive temple lands along the northern and southern fringes of the flatlands. A half million townsmen were crowded into what was indeed a small part of the city, scarcely enough to make up two of the present inner wards, or four of the smaller Meiji wards.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Edo was probably the largest city in the world. The population was well over a million, perhaps at times as much as a million and two or three hundred thousand, in a day when the largest European city, London, had not yet reached a million. The merchant and artisan population was stable at a half million. The huge military aristocracy and bureaucracy made up most of the rest. There were also large numbers of priests, Buddhist and Shinto, numbering, with their families, as many as a hundred thousand persons; and there were pariahs, beneath even the merchants, the lowest of the four classes established by Tokugawa orthodoxy. There were indigents and transients. And finally there were entertainers, accommodated more and more uncomfortably by the Tokugawa regime as it moved into its last years.

Pictures of Edo—woodcuts and screens—make it seem the loveliest of places to live. Elegant little shops are elegantly disposed among temples and shrines, each of which offers a range of amusing sights and performers, jugglers and acrobats and musicians and swordsmen, and perhaps a tiger or an elephant brought from abroad in response to the exotic yearnings of a sequestered populace.

Prominent in such representations are the main streets of Nihombashi. They suggest a pleasant buzz of life, which indeed there must have been, but they do not reveal the equally probable crowding of the back streets. The main or front streets were for the better shops and the wealthier merchants. Lesser people occupied the alleys behind, living in rows of shingled huts along open gutters, using common wells and latrines.

The old city did not fill the fifteen wards of the Meiji city, much less the twenty-three wards of the present city. It is Edo as far as the Kaneyasu, said the Edo maxim, with reference to a famous shop in the Hongō district, not far from the present Hongō campus of Tokyo University. There the provinces were said to begin, even though the jurisdiction of the city magistrates extended somewhat farther; and today the Kaneyasu is practically downtown. The city extended no more than a mile or two in most directions from the castle, and a considerably shorter distance before it reached the bay on the east. In a fifth or so of this limited area lived the steady and permanent populace of a half million townsmen, a twentieth, roughly, of the present population, on much less than a twentieth of the present land. In the back alleys the standard dwelling for the artisan or the poorer tradesman was the nine-by-twelve, two rooms, one of them earth-floored, with nine feet of frontage on the alley and extending twelve feet back from it. The wealthier merchants lived, some of them, as expansively and extravagantly as the aristocrats of the High City, but lesser inhabitants of the Low City lived with mud, dust, darkness, foul odors, insects, and epidemics. Most of the huts in the back alleys had roofs of the flimsiest and most combustible sort. They burned merrily when there was a fire. The city was proud of its fires, which were called Edo no harm, the flowers of Edo, and occurred so frequently and burned so freely that no house in the Low City could expect to last more than two decades. Some did, of course, and some have survived even into our day, but actuarial figures announced doom at intervals of no more than a quarter of a century.

It is easy to become sentimental about Edo and the beautiful way of life depicted on the screens. Nostalgia is the chief ware offered by the professional Edokko. But Meiji was an exuberant period, and even for the most conservative inhabitant there must have been a sense of release at its advent.

Tanizaki had a famous vision after the earthquake of what the rebuilt city would be like. He was in the Hakone mountains, some forty miles southwest of Tokyo, when the earthquake struck. He rejoiced in the destruction of the old city, and looked forward to something less constricting. Since he doubtless had the Nihombashi of his boyhood in mind, and the mood of Edo was still strong in that place and in those days, we may feel in his musings something of what the son of Edo must have felt upon leaving Edo and the repressive old regime behind.

Lafcadio Hearn once said that a person never forgets the things seen and heard in the depths of sorrow; but it seems to me that, whatever the time of sorrow, a person also thinks of the happy, the bright, the comical, things quite the opposite of sorrowful. When the earthquake struck I knew that I had survived, and I feared for my wife and daughter, left behind in Yokohama. Almost simultaneously I felt a surge of happiness which I could not keep down. Tokyo will be better for this! I said to myself….

I have heard that it did not take ten years for San Francisco to be a finer city than before the earthquake. Tokyo too would be rebuilt in ten years, into a solid expanse of splendid buildings like the Marunouchi Building and the Marine Insurance Building. I imagined the grandeur of the new metropolis, and all the changes that would come in customs and manners as well. An orderly pattern of streets, their bright new pavements gleaming. A flood of automobiles. The geometric beauty of block towering upon block, and elevated lines and subways and trolleys weaving among them, and the stir of a nightless city, and pleasure facilities to rival those of Paris and New York…. Fragments of the new Tokyo passed before my eyes, numberless, like flashes in a movie. Soirees, evening dresses and swallowtails and dinner jackets moving in and out, and champagne glasses floating up like the moon upon the ocean. The confusion of late night outside a theater, headlights crossing one another on darkly shining streets. The flood of gauze and satin and legs and illumination that is vaudeville. The seductive laughter of streetwalkers beneath the lights of Ginza and Asakusa and Marunouchi and Hibiya Park. The secret pleasures of Turkish baths, massage parlors, beauty parlors. Weird crimes. I have long had a way of giving myself up to daydreams in which I imagine all manner of curious things, but it was very strange indeed that these phantasms should be so stubbornly entwined among sad visions of my wife and daughter.

In the years after the Second World War, one was frequently surprised to hear from the presumably fortunate resident of an unbombed pocket that he would have been happier if it too had been bombed. A lighter and airier dwelling, more consonant with modern conveniences, might then have taken its place. The Edo townsman must have shared this view when the gates to the back alleys were dismantled and, after disappearing in fires, the alleys themselves were replaced by something more in keeping with Civilization and Enlightenment, as the rallying call of the new day had it.

Meiji brought industrial soot and other forms of advanced ugliness, and Nagai Kafū’s laments for a lost harmony were not misplaced. But it also brought liberation from old fears and afflictions. In the spring of 1888 services were held on the site of the old Kotsukappara execution grounds, in the northern suburbs, for the repose of the souls of those who had been beheaded or otherwise put to death there. The number was then estimated at a hundred thousand. The temple that now stands on the site claims to comfort and solace two hundred thousand departed spirits. If the latter figure is accepted, then about two persons a day lost their lives at Kotsukappara through the three hundred years of its use—and Kotsukappara was not the only execution grounds at the disposal of the Edo magistracy. The Meiji townsman need fear no such judicial harshness, and he was gradually rescued from epidemics and fires as well.

Kotsukappara execution grounds

There was also spiritual liberation. The playwright Hasegawa Shigure, a native of Nihombashi, thus described the feelings of her father upon the promulgation, on February 11, 1889, of the Meiji constitution: His joy and that of his fellows had to do with the end of the old humiliation, the expunging of the stigma they had carried for so many years as Edo townsmen.

One should guard against sentimentality, then; but there is the other extreme to be guarded against as well. The newly enlightened elite of Meiji was strongly disposed to dismiss Edo culture as vulgar and decadent, and the latter adjective is one commonly applied even now to the arts and literature of the early nineteenth century.

Perhaps it was decadent, in a certain narrow sense, that so much of Edo culture should have centered upon the pleasure quarters, and it is certainly true that not much late-Edo literature seems truly superior. The rigid conservatism of the shogunate, and the fact that the pleasure quarters were the only places where a small degree of democracy prevailed (class did not matter, only money and taste), may be held responsible for the decadence, if decadence there was. As for the inadequacy of late-Edo literature, good taste itself may have been more important than the products of good taste.

Because of its exquisite products we think of the Heian Period, when the Shining Genji of the tale that bears his name did everything so beautifully, as a time when everyone had good taste. But it is by its nature something that not everyone possesses. Courtly Heian and mercantile Edo must have been rather similar in that good taste was held to be important and the devices for cultivating it were abundant.

Edo culture was better than anything it left to posterity. Its genius was theatrical. The chanoyu, the tea ceremony, that most excellent product of an earlier age, was also essentially theatrical. In the hands of the affluent and cultivated, it brought together the best in handicrafts, in painting, and in architecture, and the ceremony itself was a sort of dance punctuated by ritualized conversation. The objects that surrounded it and became a part of it survived, of course, but, whatever may have been the effect on the minds and spirits of the participants, the occasion itself was an amalgam of beautiful elements put together for a few moments, and dispersed.

So it was too with the highest accomplishments of Edo—and the likening of an evening at the Yoshiwara to an afternoon of tea is not to be taken as jest. In both cases, the performance was the important thing. The notion of leaving something behind for all generations was not relevant. Much that is good in the Occidental theater is also satisfying as literature, but writings for the Tokugawa theater, whether of Edo or of Osaka, tend not to be.

The best of Edo was in the Kabuki theater and in the pleasure quarters, whose elegant evenings also wore a theatrical aspect. It was a very good best, a complex of elements combining, as with chanoyu, into a moment of something like perfection. The theater reached in many directions, to dominate, for instance, the high demimonde. The theaters and the pleasure quarters were in a symbiotic relationship. The main business of the Yoshiwara and the other quarters was, of course, prostitution, but the pre liminaries were theatrical. Great refinement in song and dance was as important to the Yoshiwara as to the theater. There were many grades of courtesan, the lowest of them an unadorned prostitute with her crib and her brisk way of doing business, but letters and paintings by the great Yoshiwara ladies turn up from time to time in exhibitions and sales, to show how accomplished they were.

The pleasure quarters were culture centers, among the few places where the townsman of affluence could feel that he had things his way, without censorious magistrates telling him to stay down there at the bottom of an unchanging social order. The Yoshiwara was central to the culture of Edo from its emergence in the seventeenth century as something more than a provincial outpost.

The elegance of the Yoshiwara was beyond the means of the poorer shopkeeper or artisan, but he shared the Edo passion for things theatrical. The city was dotted with Yose, variety or vaudeville halls, where he could go and watch and pass the time of day for a very small admission fee. There he found serious and comic monologues, imitations of great actors, juggling and balancing acts, and mere oddities. At no expense whatever there were shows on festival days in the precincts of shrines and temples. A horror play on a summer night was held to have a pleasantly chilling effect; and indeed summer, most oppressive season for the salaried middle class of the new day, was for the Edo townsman the best of seasons. He could wander around half naked of a warm evening, taking in the sights.

He did it mostly on foot. A scarcity of wheels characterized Edo, and the shift from feet to wheels was among the major revolutions of Meiji. The affluent of Edo had boats and palanquins, but almost no one but draymen used wheels. More than one modern Japanese city has been described as the Venice of Japan, and the appellation might have been used for Edo—it was not as maritime in its habits as Venice, and the proportion of waterways to streets was certainly lower, but there was a resemblance all the same. Edo had a network of waterways, natural and artificial, and the pleasantest way to go to the Yoshiwara was by boat. Left behind by movements and concentrations of modern power, Venice remained Venice. Not Edo. No Japanese city escaped the flood of wheeled vehicles, and there really is no Venice of modern Japan. Something more of the Edo canal and river system might have survived, however, if the city had not become the political center of the modern country, leading the way into Civilization and Enlightenment.

Pleasure boats moored in the northern suburbs in winter, early Meiji

In late Edo the resident of Nihombashi had to go what was for him a long distance if he wished a day at the theater or a night in the Yoshiwara. The theaters and the Yoshiwara were there side by side, leagued ge ographically as well as aesthetically in the northern suburbs. The Yoshiwara had been there through most of the Tokugawa Period. It was popularly known as the paddies. The Kabuki theaters were moved north only in very late Edo, when the shogunate had a last seizure of puritani cal zeal, and sought to ease its economic difficulties by making the towns-man live frugally.

Asakusa was already a thriving center because of its Kannon temple, and it had long been the final station for wayfarers to the Yoshiwara. Now it had the Kabuki theaters to perform a similar service for. In the last decades of Edo, the theaters and the greatest of the pleasure quarters both lay just beyond the northeastern fringe of the city, and Asakusa was that fringe. The efforts of the shogunate to discourage indulgence and prodigality among the lower classes thus had the effect of making Asakusa, despite its unfortunate situation in watery suburban lands, the great entertainment district of the city. This it was to become most decisively in Meiji.

The Kannon drew bigger crowds of pilgrims, many of them more intent upon pleasure than upon devotion, than any other temple in the city, and a big crowd was among the things the city loved best. Crowds were their own justification, and the prospect of a big crowd was usually enough to make it even bigger. When the Yoshiwara was first moved north in the seventeenth century, the Kannon sat among tidal marshes, a considerable distance north of Nihombashi, and beyond one of the points guarding access to the city proper. That is why the Yoshiwara was moved there. The shogunate did not go to the extreme of outlawing pleasure, but pleasure was asked, like funerals and cemeteries, to keep its distance.

The same happened, much later, to the theaters. The Tempo sumptuary edicts, issued between 1841 and 1843, were complex and meticulous, regulating small details of the townsman’s life. The number of variety halls in the city was reduced from upwards of five hundred to fifteen, and the fifteen were required to be serious and edifying.

Ladies in several trades—musicians, hairdressers, and the proprietresses of archery stalls in such places as the Asakusa Kannon—were held to be a wanton influence, and forbidden to practice.

In 1842 the Kabuki theater was picked up and moved to the northern limits of the city, a five-minute walk nearer Asakusa than the Yoshiwara. Kabuki was enormously popular in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The more successful actors were cultural heroes and leaders of fashion and taste, not unlike television personalities today. When two major theaters burned down, permission to rebuild was denied, and the possibility was considered of outlawing Kabuki completely. There was disagreement among the city magistrates, and a compromise was reached, permitting them to rebuild, but far from their old grounds. The suburban villa of a daimyo was taken over for the purpose. There the theaters remained even after the reforming zeal had passed, and there they were when Edo became Tokyo, and the Meiji Period began.

So Asakusa was well placed to provide the city of the new era with its pleasures. It has declined sadly in recent decades, and its preeminence in late Edo and early Meiji may have been partly responsible. People had traveled there on foot and by